This paper discusses the desirability of government-legislated job security. Job security may be beneficial to employed workers, but it can also impose a cost on unemployed workers by lowering labour market turnover and thereby increasing the average duration of unemployment spells. This...

A recent paper has suggested a reason why there might be a lasting trade-off between inflation and unemployment at low inflation rates. This has led some economists to recommend that Canada increase its inflation rate. The idea underlying this view is that, because firms are reluctant to cut...

Vertical separation of generation from electricity retailing has often been required as a condition of electricity market liberalisation. A well-developed and liquid contracts market is similarly suggested as necessary to manage the resulting wholesale market risks which risks are further...

Seamus Hogan presented Vertical Integration and Market Power in Electricity Markets at an ISCR seminar in Wellington on 1 May 2007

The fixed-price-offer (FPO) mechanism in <italic>Trade Me</italic> auctions allows sellers to make a take-it-or-leave-it offer at the conclusion of an unsuccessful auction. Weinvestigate the effects of the FPO option on strategies and outcomes in independent-value auctions. The FPO option induces some bidders...

This article is concerned with models in which an agent faces a lottery with <italic>j</italic> other agents for a prize, so that the probability of winning the prize is 1/(<italic>j</italic> + 1), and where <italic>j</italic> is stochastic. After describing four different situations where such a lottery is present, we construct the expected...

Consider the class of games in which each player chooses a strategy from a connected subset of the real line. Many oligopoly models fall into this class. In many of these applications, it would be useful to show that an equilibrium was unique, or at least to have a set of conditions under which...

Matching models of the labour market have been of particular interest in macroeconomics where the notion of 'thick-market' externalities can lead to multiple equilibria. This has led to some recent interest in constructing empirical estimates of labor-market matching functions. This paper argues...